Amoeba Music

One of the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most radical provocations finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly in a procession of sacred and profane images, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.

Special Features:

• Restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack featuring the voices of actor Terence Stamp and others
• Audio commentary from 2007 featuring Robert S. C. Gordon, author of Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity
• Introduction by director Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1969
• Interview from 2007 with Stamp
• New interview with John David Rhodes, author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome
• New English subtitle translation
• An essay by film scholar James Quandt